“I enjoyed doing the soundtrack so much more than I was enjoying what I was working on,” he tells me while driving through Arizona. “Everything had been coming to me a little too easily — and I realized that I wasn’t pushing myself in any way. I decided to try another angle.” Cooper scrapped what he had done and started anew, yielding to a persistent desire to capture the sounds within him. “I just had words swirling around in my head.”

It’s no small feat working words into ambient music. Where Barwick’s voice soars and multiplies, free of the trappings of meaning or misunderstanding, Cooper’s task was to introduce narrative where there was barely acknowledgment of time. Not to mention that he hadn’t sung since he was in a band as a teenager, 15 years ago. “It was a tough balance to maintain,” he confirms, “but my biggest consideration was just being honest, even if the subject matter seemed pretty abstract. If you are going to sing, you have to make sure it’s you singing.”

As such — and as is the case with Barwick — Cooper’s newest output feels closest to Cooper himself, even as he makes himself most present as just another sonic stripe. His voice sneaks around the corners of “Weird Creatures” as glimmering keys shine off the song’s high ceilings. “The Motion Makes Me Last” pairs a deep, woody piano with a strident sheet of digital debris (as Gastr del Sol used to do so well), then runs it through a melancholy Factory Records filter. Cooper’s place in the mix is like the thinker’s within a thought, essential but not in charge of its journey. Or, as he chants it, “I’m a vessel between two places I’ve never been.”

As “ambient” music goes, the songs that make up Similes are surprisingly inviting — maybe even accessible, for the patient among us. The glowing, loping “Making Up Minds” could as easily tickle persnickety fans of Jan Jelinek or Ekkehard Ehlers as it could convert a Coldplay fan. And his recent interest in “more sets of hands” has found Eluvium upgrade from a lonely solo act on stage to a trio with heaps of keyboards, laptops, guitars, and voices — the sound is fuller, bolder, and more vast, but it’s never sounded more like Cooper. Now he just needs to learn how to share.

“I’m not really the best leader in the world,” he laughs. “There’s a part of me that’s a real control freak, so that sort of thing has been relatively impossible for me. At the same time, it’s been very liberating having other people bring something to it. Part of me wants to look into that sense of adventure and not be in total control.”

Ghost stories For all of the excitement that surrounded Wilco on the Maine State Pier or Sufjan Stevens at Port City Music Hall or the various sold-out Ray LaMontagne shows of the past year, there is no question that last Sunday's Phish show at the Cumberland County Civic Center was the biggest thing to hit our fair city in a very long time.

Winged migration Since their start in the middle of the decade, Brown Bird have been one of the region's go-to chamber-folk outfits, with a couple of dark and stormy albums earning them a following in various nooks of New England. The release of their latest album, The Devil Dancing , feels like both an ending and a new beginning.

Injustice for all Scott Sturgeon loses his train of thought a couple of times during this interview. He's loopy from jet lag — which is unavoidable after a 20-hour flight from New Zealand (halfway around the planet from his non-residency at a squatted apartment building in New York City), where he's just finished a tour with his claim-to-fame band, Leftover Crack.

Wanting more After its triumphant traversal of the complete Béla Bartók string quartets at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Borromeo Quartet was back for a free 20th- and 21st-century program at Jordan Hall, leading off with an accomplished recent piece by the 24-year-old Egyptian composer Mohammed Fairuz, Lamentation and Satire.

Group hug Things aren’t always what they’re called — we know that flying fish don’t fly and starfish aren’t even fish.

Local heroes, ’09 edition The Rhode Island music community flourished in 2009, with new full-lengths from the Coming Weak, California Smile, and the pride of Cranston West and official big-leaguers Monty Are I, who released Break Through the Silence in September.

Local flavor Local journalist and acclaimed hip-hop scribe Andrew Martin has corralled a flavorful roster of Rhody-based rap talent on the Ocean State Sampler , 10 exclusive tracks available for free download.

Beyond Dilla and Dipset With a semi-sober face I'll claim that hip-hop in 2010 might deliver more than just posthumous Dilla discs, Dipset mixtapes, and a new ignoramus coke rapper whom critics pretend rhymes in triple-entendres.

John Harbison plus 10 Classical music in Boston is so rich, having to pick 10 special events for this winter preview is more like one-tenth of the performances I'm actually looking forward to.

Shout it out! Sharks Come Cruisin' founder Mark Lambert is a Warwick native with a penchant for reworking and penning sea shanties from centuries past, often revised with rollicking punk flare — all thanks to the golden pipes of Quint, the shark-obsessed skipper in Jaws .

BOSTON PRIDE WEEK: OFF THE MAP | June 07, 2010 We may seem a little cranky, but us local gayfolk just love a parade, and we’re actually heartened by this annual influx of brothers and sisters from every state of New England and every letter of our ever-expanding acronym.

THE NEW GAY BARS | June 02, 2010 If I may channel the late, great Estelle Getty for a moment: picture it, Provincetown, 2009, a dashing young man with no discernible tan and an iffy T-Mobile signal languishes bored upon the sprawling patio of the Boatslip Resort.

ARIEL PINK’S HAUNTED GRAFFITI | BEFORE TODAY | June 01, 2010 If the gradual polishing of Ariel Pink’s sound — and it’s not all that much more polished — puts his loyalists at odds with his albums, I count that as good news.

MORE THAN HUMAN | May 26, 2010 It’s hard to talk about Janelle Monáe when your jaw’s fallen off.